Thanks for the reply, it helped me understand where you are coming from.
For purposes of discussing bitcoin, it is a global good, and environmental concerns are a global concern. If there is a global market for bitcoin, then taxing bitcoin mining (or other such measures) in one country would just incentivize miners to move to another country. So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations.
> There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good.
Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder. I agree that we need some sort of action for climate change, but I am not sure regulating bitcoin is the answer. We'd have to apply the same subject "utility" measuring stick to _any_ activity that consumes electricity and regulate that. Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact would be more effective and would apply evenly to all goods / services without deciding on behalf of individuals what is useful and what is not.
I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful.
> Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated
Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who?
> the incentives should be updated to support things that are consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not.
Please define useful. Humans have different needs and value things differently. What is useful to one may not be useful to the other. Any system that picks winners will also pick losers.
For purposes of discussing bitcoin, it is a global good, and environmental concerns are a global concern. If there is a global market for bitcoin, then taxing bitcoin mining (or other such measures) in one country would just incentivize miners to move to another country. So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations.
> There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good.
Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder. I agree that we need some sort of action for climate change, but I am not sure regulating bitcoin is the answer. We'd have to apply the same subject "utility" measuring stick to _any_ activity that consumes electricity and regulate that. Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact would be more effective and would apply evenly to all goods / services without deciding on behalf of individuals what is useful and what is not.